Wangechi Mutu "The Timeless, Ancient Language of Art" TED Talk
"Using found materials and mesmerizing structures that unearth deep-rooted emotions, Wangechi Mutu's visual creations celebrate our collective history and explore how art communicates into the future. From ancient rock carvings in the Sahel to her own chimeric abstractions, she shares her journey of self-discovery and reminds us all that we already speak the most ancient language of all."
Dave McKenzie Acquired by
The Whitney Museum of American Art
Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to announce the acquisition of Dave McKenzie's "Listed under accessories," 2022 by The Whitney Museum of American Art!
Dave McKenzie's two-channel video, Listed under accessories, was included in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Quiet as It's Kept, curated by Adrienne Edwards and David Breslin and was acquired by the museum for the permanent collection.
Wangechi Mutu
Intertwined
The New Museum
The New Museum presents "Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined" running from March 2 through June 4, 2023 a major solo exhibition of the work of Wangechi Mutu.
Representing the full breadth of her practice, the presentation will encompass painting, collage, drawing, sculpture, film, and performance. Mutu first gained acclaim for her collage-based practice exploring camouflage, transformation, and mutation. She extends these strategies to her work across various media, developing hybrid, fantastical forms that fuse mythical and folkloric narratives with layered sociohistorical references. “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined” will trace connections between recent developments in the artist’s sculptural practice and her decades-long exploration of the legacies of colonialism, globalization, and African and diasporic cultural traditions. At once culturally specific and transnational in scope, Mutu’s work grapples with contemporary realities, while proffering new models for a radically changed future informed by feminism, Afrofuturism, and interspecies symbiosis.
Ruben Ochoa
Frieze Los Angeles Projects
Art Production Fund’s ‘Now Playing’ brings together a series of artworks that shine a light on the often-overlooked elements of everyday life in Los Angeles; the vehicles, street food, sports, aircraft, construction sites and deeper histories that blend into the background. The artists featured in ‘Now Playing’ provide a lens through which we can see these quotidian details anew; ever present but unseen, that make Los Angeles a city both complex and beloved. ‘Now Playing’ receives support from Art of Recovery, an initiative of the City of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs. Participating artists in ‘Now Playing’ include Autumn Breon, Chris Burden, Jose Dávila, Basil Kincaid, Divya Mehra, Ruben Ochoa, Alake Shilling and Jennifer West.
Ruben Ochoa pays tribute to the street vendor community, connecting his personal narrative to his art making.
Stanya Kahn
2023 R.U.in.ART Commission
Frieze Los Angeles
At Frieze Los Angeles 2023, Stanya Kahn will create the newest iteration of the R.U.in.ART Commission: an annual initiative that invites a Californian artist to realize a commission in the Ruinart lounge at Frieze Los Angeles.
Kahn’s commission, titled Understory, takes the form of an installation in which elements of the natural world frame paintings and sculptures depicting lone animals in imagined wilds. Drawing on her 2022 exhibition at Vielmetter Los Angeles, Forest for the Trees, the installation references forms of life that dwell between the forest floor and the canopy.
Genevieve Gaignard
Mickalene Thomas in
Resting Our Eyes
ICA San Francisco
Hugo McCloud
Art in Action
Art Basel Video
In the latest episode of Art Basel’s ‘Art in Action’ series, we visit Hugo McCloud in his Los Angeles studio. There he takes us through the origin and creation of his artworks using plastic bags as the primary material. In these works, McCloud depicts scenarios – the transportation of goods, construction, landscaping – that are common across the globe to tell the stories of the laborers who often go unnoticed. The pieces presented in the film are part of a series McCloud informally refers to as ‘the burdened man.’ It is an homage to the anonymous men and women whose daily subsistence is an extraordinary act of resilience. ‘The stories of these individuals and the strengths they carry is something to look up to,’ he says.
John Sonsini Acquired by
The Hessel Museum
Vielmetter Los Angeles is happy to announce the recent acquisition of John Sonsini's 2009 painting "Francisco & Raul" by the Marieluise Hessel Collection, Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.
This acquisition was made possible through the generous support of Cheim & Read.
Bari Ziperstein
The Wende Museum
Bari Ziperstein's installation "Domestic Choices" at The Wende Museum Guardhouse Project opens November 13 and runs through March 2023.
Conceived specifically for Wende Museum’s original East German Guardhouse, Bari Ziperstein’s Domestic Choices (2022) is a set of painted and embroidered curtains encircling the interior of the guardhouse, which is lit from within to generate a warm glow. Rather than face inward, the curtains in Domestic Choices face outward, confusing not only the orientation of inside and outside but also the very purpose of curtains in general and the guardhouse itself, a tiny piece of architecture intended for privacy’s opposite: surveillance.
The curtains in Domestic Choices are inspired by the hundreds of textile patterns Ziperstein has encountered through her extensive research in the Wende Museum archives. Though this research has informed her work in ceramics for many years, this is the first time she has worked in textiles herself. Made in collaboration with artist Jill Spector, the curtains were first block printed with celery hearts and sponges to suggest a petaled flower pattern. Then, using hand cut stencils and spray paint to achieve a misty effect, Ziperstein added abstract shapes. Next, she painted leaf and dot patterns in free hand. The final layer is embroidery depicting Soviet war planes, done by Spector. The pattern synthesizes themes Ziperstein has noticed over and over in her research: benign imagery such as florals and repeated abstract patterns combined with symbols of military might.
Deborah Roberts
The McNay
True Believers: Benny Andrews & Deborah Roberts provides a historic and contemporary view of the Black experience in America through the work of two artists from different generations. This exhibition explores the deep connections between the work of these two artists in relation to formal similarities, specifically the utilization of collage, as well as their shared interest in themes of activism, racial injustice, family, and religion.
Sarah Cain
The Orange County Museum of Art
Congratulations to Sarah Cain whose site-specific painting is included in "13 Women" opening The Orange County Museum of Art on October 8th!
Stanya Kahn Acquired by
The Walker Art Center
"Stand in the Stream" captures the rise of the internet and social media as tools for political organizing while simultaneously exposing their evolution into powerful sources of surveillance and marketing. Edited with precision and intensity, the film’s footage (all shot by Kahn or screen-recorded by Kahn in real time) moves globally and locally through the wild, the streets, the home, and online, in a visceral, phenomenological reflection of life, power and uprising in late capitalism.
Articulating a powerful personal dynamic to political movements, the narrative arc of the film is shaped by the decline of Kahn’s mother to dementia, and the birth and growth of her son amid the shift of political and digital landscapes over time. An activist and former shipyard worker, Kahn's mother speaks candidly about unions, NAFTA, the dangers of politicians in the pockets of lobbyists, how she wouldn’t want to get dementia like her mother before, even as she deteriorates. Her illness and death are woven with lo-fi clips of Kahn’s home life raising her son, caretaking, repairing, working, always from the POV of a camera. Interspersed and ongoing, is Kahn’s persistent screen recording of live streams on the internet.
"Stand in the Stream" mimics our screen-saturated perspectives, hinting at questions of accountability, acknowledging our participation in a sometimes voyeuristic and alienated consumption of the world through images. In Kahn’s massive collection of footage—edited with an operatic sense of sound’s power to draw the epic from the mundane—we experience capitalism’s acculturation of our very personhood and the blooms of resistance and resilience.
Kahn’s sound design includes original compositions by Kahn and the musician/composer Alexia Riner.
Deborah Roberts
The Cummer Museum
On view September 16 - December 4, 2022
Deborah Roberts critiques notions of beauty, the body, race, and identity in contemporary society through the lens of Black children. Her mixed media works on paper and on canvas combine found images, sourced from the Internet, with hand-painted details in striking figural compositions that invite viewers to look closely, to see through the layers. She focuses her gaze on Black children—historically, and still today, among the most vulnerable members of our population—investigating how societal pressures, projected images of beauty or masculinity, and the violence of American racism conditions their experiences growing up in this country as well as how others perceive them. Simultaneously heroic and insecure, playful and serious, powerful and vulnerable, the figures Roberts depicts are complex, occasionally based on actual living or historical persons.
Rodney McMillian
Art Institute Chicago
This program of three works in the Art Institute’s collection represents highlights from McMillian’s work in video. In Untitled (The Great Society) I (2006), he stages a performance in which he recites President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 commencement speech at the University of Michigan. By narrating this speech—in which Johnson outlined his ambitious agenda for social welfare legislation aimed at ending poverty and racial injustice—McMillian raised questions about how history and politics are themselves consistently, and repeatedly, performed. A Migration Tale (2014–15) follows a masked, black-clad character traveling on foot and via subway, a contemporary reference to the Great Migration that millions of African Americans made during the first half of the 20th century. In Preacher Man (2015), McMillian sits calmly on a chair in an empty field and presents philosophical musings by the experimental jazz composer and musician Sun Ra.
Genevieve Gaignard Acquired by
The MFA Houston
Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to announce the acquisition of Genevieve Gaignard's installation "Family Tree" by the Museum of Fine Arts Houston! The work is currently on view in the Kinder Building.
Andrea Bowers
The Hammer Museum
Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Andrea Bowers on the opening of her solo exhibition at the Hammer Museum on view through September 4, 2022.
For more than 30 years, Andrea Bowers (b. 1965, Wilmington, Ohio) has made art that activates. She combines artistic practice with activism and advocacy, speaking to deeply entrenched inequities as well as the generations of activists working to create a more just world. Bowers has built an international reputation as a chronicler of contemporary history, documenting activism as it unfolds and collecting research on the front lines of protest. Her practice contends with issues such as immigration rights, workers’ rights, climate justice, and women’s rights, illustrating the shared pursuit of justice that connects them.
Andrea Bowers, the first museum retrospective surveying more than two decades of the artist’s production, traces the entire scope and evolution of her work. Bringing together approximately 60 works as well as a trove of ephemera, the exhibition reflects Bowers’s embrace and experimentation with a wide range of mediums, including drawing, performance, installation, sculpture, video, and neon sculptures.
Andrea Bowers is organized by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The exhibition is co-curated by Michael Darling, formerly the James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Connie Butler, Chief Curator of the Hammer Museum, with Nika Chilewich, curatorial assistant, Hammer Museum.
John Sonsini
Laguna Art Museum
Southern California-based artist John Sonsini and Laguna Art Museum’s Curatorial Fellow Rochelle Steiner will be in conversation about the work of artist Francis de Erdely, the subject of the museum’s major exhibition Striking Figures: Francis de Erdely.
Saturday, June 11, 2022
6:00 p.m.
Sarah Cain
Yunhee Min
Metro Art Commissions
Congratulations to Sarah Cain and Yunhee Min who are selected for the Purple (D Line) Extension Transit Project with Metro Art. Sarah Cain is commissioned for the Century City/Constellation Station and Yunhee Min is commissioned for the Westwood/UCLA Station.
Ellen Berkenblit
Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Award in Art
Congratulations to Ellen Berkenblit who is the 2022 recipient of the Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters!
Yunhee Min
Linda Besemer
2022 Guggenheim Fellowships
Artists Yunhee Min and Linda Besemer are 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship Recipients for Fine Art.
Wangechi Mutu
Storm King
"The Storm King exhibition will feature bronze sculptures installed in the indoor and outdoor spaces of the centre that will aim to emphasise Mutu’s interest in the natural world, something that has “been present but not at the forefront of conversations around her work”, according to Nora Lawrence, the centre’s artistic director and chief curator.
“Mutu’s work is rooted in the idea of karmic power, or a future where humans have reconnected with the environment, where human and non-human elements merge and create a greater force because of their union,” Lawrence tells The Art Newspaper. “The landscape at Storm King is an ideal platform for understanding this facet of her work.”
The commission includes a monumental fountain spanning 15 ft. in length that will flank an area known as “museum hill”, a focal point of the sculpture park that offers panoramic views of the grounds and houses another iconic sculptural fountain, the work North South East West (1988/2009/2014-15) by Lynda Benglis. Mutu’s work will take the form of a water-filled canoe holding anthropomorphic female figures that are intertwined with tendrilous roots resembling mangroves."
By Gabriella Angeleti - 15 March 2022
Genevieve Gaignard
Atlanta Contemporary
Genevieve Gaignard's solo exhibition “This is America: The Unsettling Contradictions in American Identity” curated by Karen Comer Lowe is on view through May 15, 2022 at the Atlanta Contemporary.
Deborah Roberts
I'm
Art + Practice and CAAM
“Deborah Roberts: I’m,” features the artist’s mixed-media works and will be on view at Art + Practice from March 19 through August 20, 2022. In tandem, the artist’s figurative mural “Little man, little man,” 2020, will be installed on the walls in the California African American Museum's expansive lobby, encouraging viewers to travel between the two sites.
Rodney McMillian
Dave McKenzie in
2022 Whitney Biennial
Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates gallery artists Dave McKenzie and Rodney McMillian on their inclusion in the 2022 Whitney Biennial curated by David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards.
Deborah Roberts
Genevieve Gaignard
Blanton Museum
Deborah Roberts and Genevieve Gaignard are featured in "Assembly: New Acquisitions by Contemporary Black Artists" at the Blanton Museum of Art on view through May 8, 2022.
"Assembly includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, textiles, and a monumental print, all produced between 1980 and 2019. Although diverse in style and subject matter, many of the works have ties to Southern history and reveal what scholar Saidiya Hartman refers to as “the long afterlife of slavery.” For example, the shared surname of two—unrelated—quiltmakers in the exhibition, Arie Pettway and Sally Mae Pettway Mixon, is that of the plantation owner their enslaved ancestors were forced to serve in Gee’s Bend, Alabama. Kevin Beasley’s resin sculpture incorporates raw cotton from his family’s farm in Virginia. Nari Ward’s immersive installation honors overlooked places, people, and traditions in Savannah, Georgia. Cauleen Smith made her recent neon work in memory of Sandra Bland, a Black woman who died in police custody after a routine traffic stop in Waller County, Texas.
The title of the presentation, Assembly, embraces the heterogeneity of work made by Black artists, refusing generalization, essentialization, and definitive interpretation. As theorized by the late British cultural critic Stuart Hall and expanded on by American philosopher Paul C. Taylor, with “assembly” comes the potential for disassembly and reassembly. In this gathering, we encounter acts of representation, resilience, reclamation, and resistance."
Sarah Cain Acquired by The National Gallery of Art
"The National Gallery of Art has acquired Sarah Cain’s Self-Portrait (2020), an exuberant, mixed-media abstract painting. The non-representational self-portrait is the first work by this original artist to enter the National Gallery’s collection.
Self-Portrait features a dynamic whorl of hard-edged colored bands creating curvilinear forms that alternate between foreground—for example, the large black band with drips that descend throughout the lower register—and background, as illustrated by the black translucent ground of smaller organic shapes. Cain incorporates an abstract vocabulary of form, color, and materials in this painting to create speculation about this painting’s meaning as a self-portrait. She sewed prismatic beads, given to her by her mother, into the center of the canvas as a kind of supportive, light-filled spine—an example of the personal symbolism in this work. Cain’s Self-Portrait painting brings the tradition of abstract painting into the present and continues a rich dialog with countless works in the National Gallery’s collection, including abstract works by artists Lynda Benglis, Ellsworth Kelly, Joan Mitchell, Amy Sillman, Joan Snyder, Frank Stella, and Richard Tuttle."
Rodney McMillian at The Bemis Center
Curated by Sylvie Fortin, I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality invites visitors to consider how hospitality has simultaneously circumscribed what we think bodies are, what we imagine they can do, how we feel they relate, whom we believe they can encounter, and ultimately, how they engage with each other and in the world. The exhibition explores these questions in space by weaving together open-ended experiential connections between works in a range of media, from painting, sculpture, textile, installation and performance to lens- and time-based practices. These works explore several questions, including pregnancy and surrogacy; transplantation, implantation and transfusion; neural adaptation and the phantom limb; bacteria and the microbiome; viruses, parasites, symbionts and holobionts; stem cells; mechanical and chemical prosthetics; architectures and protocols of corporeal hospitality; dreams and dreamwork; and the “miraculous” work of relics, spirits and energies. In the process, the exhibition reveals a storied genealogy that points to the extractive intersection of race, gender, class, religion and value. I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality critically excavates this legacy and offers up an expanded theater of operations.
The exhibition includes works by Ingrid Bachmann, Crystal Z Campbell, Jean-Charles de Quillacq, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Stephanie Dinkins, Celina Eceiza, Adham Faramawy, Mounir Fatmi, Flis Holland, Oliver Husain, Rodney McMillian, Bridget Moser, Pedro Neves Marques, Berenice Olmedo, Kerstin Schroedinger, Jenna Sutela, Ana Torfs, and Francis Upritchard.
December 9, 2021 - March 19, 2022
Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts
Esther Pearl Watson at the Richmond Center for Visual Arts
The exhibition features Watson's body of work tackling everyday scenes of the artist's life during the pandemic. Curated by Indra Lācis, Director of Exhibitions.
"Both individually and as a cohesive timeline, the artist’s Pandemic Paintings invoke active forms of reflection and remembrance, as well as a sense of mutually shared vulnerability and participation in understanding the surreal and significant events of 2020."
Mary Reid Kelley & Patrick Kelley at The Fabric Workshop and Museum
Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley are celebrated for video works featuring a distinctively graphic black-and-white palette and scripted narratives in rhyming verse full of punning wordplay by characters brought to life onscreen by Mary. Centered around two new film works—Blood Moon and I’m Jackson Pollock—the exhibition explores the mechanics of power and its fallibility, each film presented in an immersive world and experienced through a darkly funny lens. Co-curated by Alec Unkovic, Exhibitions Manager, and Karen Patterson, Curator and Director of Exhibitions.
Pope L. at Portikus in Frankfurt
Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Pope.L on the opening of Misconceptions, his first solo video exhibition in Germany at Portikus in Frankfurt. The exhibition features a new video work titled Missverständnisse. It consists of several episodes produced in the format of a TV quiz show and filmed at Portikus and other places around Frankurt's city center. The exhibition is curated by Christina Lehnert.
Louise Fishman 1939 - 2021
It is with great sadness that we announce the passing away of artist and friend, Louise Fishman, at the age of 82. Our heartfelt condolences go out to her partner, Ingrid Nyeboe, her family, and her close community of friends, artists, poets, musicians, and spiritual practitioners.
Born in Philadelphia in 1939, Louise Fishman forged a unique and prolific career — five decades of consistently manifesting the energy and vision required to create a more aesthetically generous world. In lineage with such painters as Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Joan Mitchell as well as finding influence through friendships with artists Agnes Martin and Eva Hesse, Fishman developed an articulate and athletic approach to painterly abstraction merging the hard-edge objectivity of the grid and the gestural subjectivity of expressionism, all the while developing a language for art-making rooted in her identities as Jewish, feminist, and lesbian.
Working with Louise was an absolute honor; her distinguished career, her feminism, her activism, and her oeuvre of dynamic paintings are a combined act of fortitude and grace.
A retrospective of works on paper, A Question of Emphasis: Louise Fishman Drawing will be on view August 2021 — February 25, 2022, at the Krannert Art Museum, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Curated by Amy Powell, A Question of Emphasis: Louise Fishman Drawing will be the first career-spanning exhibition and publication of Fishman’s works on paper, including more than 100 works from the artist’s archive that have rarely been exhibited alongside significant institutional and private loans.
Raffi Kalenderian Acquired by The Georgia Museum of Art
Raffi Kalenderian's painting “Julia Perry,” 2020 was acquired by the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, Georgia as a promised gift of John and Sara Shlesinger.
Arlene Shechet
Harvard Art Museums
Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Arlene Shechet on the opening of "Disrupt the View: Arlene Shechet at the Harvard Art Museums" on view through July 6, 2025.
By presenting her recent work alongside historical German, Japanese, and Chinese examples, sculptor Arlene Shechet encourages us to look anew at works of porcelain and other objects from the Harvard Art Museums. Decorative arts are typically displayed in museum galleries dedicated to the same culture and period, often in isolation from other media. In Disrupt the View, however, Shechet draws on her past collaborations with porcelain manufactory workers to speak to a larger history, recontextualizing these remarkable objects as both handmade and industrially manufactured, painterly and sculptural.
Sarah Cain—Enter the Center
The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery
Sarah Cain acquired by Orange County Museum of Art
"Zuckerman made operational changes to the building as well — mostly tweaks related to security, staff offices or visitor experience. She added five board trustees and nailed down the new opening date. She also began acquiring art, beginning with an “eight-talisman installation” by L.A. artist Sarah Cain.
“Eight is the number of infinite abundance,” Zuckerman says. “They’re painted dollar bills suspended from the ceiling with fishing wire. The backs are silver or gold and the fronts are vibrant [colors]. I tell our team, ‘Walk under them, tell them what you need!’”
By Deborah Vankin - 14 June 2021
Genevieve Gaignard in Beyond the Looking Glass at UTA Artist Space
UTA Artist Space is pleased to present Beyond the Looking Glass, a group exhibition of surrealist takes by women about women. Beyond the Looking Glass is curated by gallery director Zuzanna Ciolek, one of the first members of the UTA Fine Arts team when it was established in 2015.
The ambitious exhibition fills all three gallery spaces with bold works by a cross-generational group of fourteen women-identifying artists: Firelei Báez, Tawny Chatmon, Charlotte Colbert, Kim Dacres, Florine Démosthène, Genevieve Gaignard, Sanam Khatibi, Klara Kristalova, Shannon T. Lewis, Jesse Mockrin, GaHee Park, Hiba Schahbaz, Kiki Smith, and Jessica Stoller.
“While organizing this exhibition, I enjoyed poking holes in traditional standards of beauty in art and pop culture,” said exhibition curator and UTA Artist Space director Zuzanna Ciolek. “And within that playful and provocative framework, the show aims to explore contemporary femininity and representation.”
Beyond the Looking Glass presents a new lens for representation through surreal and uncanny artworks that address sexuality, race, and identity— radically defying solely ornamental representation. Taking inspiration from Alice in Wonderland, the title Beyond the Looking Glass is a twist on Through the Looking Glass, moving beyond a world where women are being seen as purely ornamental. The exhibition pulls viewers into an unexpected world filled with surrealist characters such as an elephant girl, a pink “C-section” vessel equipped with breasts, and a woman riding a reptile. While disrupting traditional portraiture of the Western Canon and confronting stereotypical representations of women, the figures portrayed transcend these societal constraints. With these archaic indicators of femininity stripped away, the surreal and expressionist imagery allows her to break out, expanding beyond the body.
Limited Edition Print by Math Bass
Vielmetter Los Angeles — in collaboration with Cultured Magazine — is pleased to announce the launch of a new editioned print by Los Angeles artist Math Bass.
This distinctly graphic print is from the artist's ongoing series entitled Newz!; a seamlessly sophisticated composition informed by the artist’s signature visual lexicon of symbols and shapes. Screen printing by Tom Kracauer, Los Angeles with additional lithography by Francesco Siqueiros (El Nopal Press). Printed on Coventry Rag; 100% cotton and acid free.
Math Bass "Newz!," 2021
Limited edition screen print + lithograph
21 x 19 inches (53.34 x 48.26 cm) paper size
Edition of 50; Signed, dated, editioned on verso
Courtesy of the artist, Vielmetter Los Angeles, and Cultured Magazine
Photo credit: Jeff McLane
2000 USD
Hugo McCloud at The Aldrich
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presents from where i stand, the first solo museum exhibition of Hugo McCloud. McCloud’s work has been defined by a restless experimentation, an ongoing engagement with process, an exploration of the value of labor, a concern with disparities in social and racial economics, and with the nature of beauty. McCloud’s earlier work can generally be categorized as abstraction, with its veiled subject matter growing out of his experiences of being biracial and his family’s working-class roots. These influences are evident in the materials and process he gravitates to—roofing metal, tar, and most recently plastic shopping bags. He has consistently used non-art mediums to encode social and cultural memory and to reflect on notions of race, class, and economic inequity. His latest figurative works, which were influenced by his move to Mexico in 2018, are composed of single-use plastic bags, depicting workers transporting towering piles of goods on bicycles, motorcycles, and their backs, as well as the overfilled carts of the homeless and indigent. Increasingly, his work speaks of the economics of labor and geopolitics on a fundamental level, while encapsulating the artist’s interest in global culture. from where i stand will occupy The Aldrich’s entire first floor and will include approximately thirty-five works borrowed from both private collections and the artist.
Karl Haendel Acquired by The Hammer Museum
Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to announce the acquisition of Double Dominant 4 (Rodney McMillian), 2018 by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. This drawing was included in Haendel's 2020 exhibition Double Dominant at Vielmetter Los Angeles.
The exhibition featured monumental drawings of the dominant hands, doubled, of 24 LA based artists of Haendel’s generation. These highly rendered drawings, for which the artist digitally manipulated the dominant hand of each subject to impossibly interact with itself, ask us to consider labor, time, human touch and individual style in relationship to the practice of making art. The project also reflects the artist's deep commitment to his community of artists, and the high value he places on dialogue and conversation within that community. A volume reproducing the complete set of works, published by Triangle Books with an essay by Natilee Harren, accompanied the exhibition.
Patrick Wilson included in Break + Bleed at San Jose Museum of Art
"Drawn primarily from SJMA’s permanent collection, Break + Bleed features both paintings and works on paper by historically significant artists who exemplify the spirit of post-painterly abstraction through an expansive range of styles including hard-edge abstraction, Color Field painting, Op art, Minimalism, and soft-edge abstraction. Artworks in this exhibition feature biomorphic and geometric shapes, angular and wavy lines, and lively planes of color. The work of Josef Albers—from his celebrated series devoted to the square, exploring the subjective experience of color—may be the most recognizable. For Karl Benjamin, interlocking and sometimes twisted shapes created energetic color associations and incongruous patterns. This exhibition also features contemporary artists like Linda Besemer, Patrick Wilson, and others who are pushing post-painterly abstraction into new territories."
Friday, June 4, 2021–Sunday, April 3, 2022
Organized by Rory Padeken, curator
Nicole Eisenman "Giant Without a Body" Now on View!
Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Nicole Eisenman on the opening of Giant without a body, a survey of the artist's work from 2006 through the present at the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Genevieve Gaignard in "Photo Flux" at Getty Center
Artists Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Genevieve Gaignard are featured in "Photo Flux: Unshuttering LA" at The Getty Center. On view May 25 - October 10, 2021.
"Photographs by 35 Los Angeles-based artists challenge ideals of beauty, representation, cultural capital, and objectivity. The artists in this exhibition, primarily people of color, have radically transformed photography to express their own aesthetics, identities, and narratives. Their work is foundational for an emerging generation of artists participating in the Getty Unshuttered program, which engages teens to seek photography as a platform to amplify social topics that resonate in their own lives."
Curated by jill moniz
Ruben Ochoa Fundraising Print II
Now available in our webshop: Ruben Ochoa's second limited-edition fundraising print supporting The Street Vendor Emergency Fund!
Your purchase of Ruben Ochoa's LACMA x Snapchat fundraising print directly supports the initiative of Inclusive Action's emergency Los Angeles Street Vendor Campaign. The funds from each individual print will translate directly to a $400 cash card for street vendors and their families, many of whom have not been eligible to receive direct pandemic relief funding from the government.
¡Vendedores, Presente! responds to L.A.’s shared history with street vendors. Ruben Ochoa draws attention to the region’s familiar fruit carts, paleteros, and flower stands creating a large-scale immersive environment that calls for solidarity with vendor advocacy. This project is part of LACMA × Snapchat: Monumental Perspectives.
Genevieve Gaignard in Girl You Want at ArtYard
"ArtYard is pleased to present, Girl You Want, curated by J. Vanessa Lyon and featuring artists Genevieve Gaignard, Julia Greenburger, Jen Liu, Josh Rabineau, Wendy and Beatrice Red Star, Karinne Smith, Ivy Stewart, and María Vargas Aguilar.
What’s a girl? What do you expect from a girl or want girlhood to be? How are girls un/made? Are they pieced together, imagined, constructed? This exhibition examines what girling looks and feels like through a range of representational strategies, from portraiture to speculative narrative; from dress to interiors and the prettified materials of commodification and colonization. In this show “girl” and “girly” are not offered as stable or essential but are rather understood as shifting states untethered to “sex” or even age."
Ruben Ochoa Event at LACMA
In celebration of Ruben Ochoa’s project for LACMA × Snapchat: Monumental Perspectives, view a short documentary series that follows street vendors as they unpack the history of the vending economy in Los Angeles, their efforts to organize and build sustainable businesses, the challenges and threats they face in this work environment, and the great impact the pandemic has had on this community.
Andrea Bowers: UC DAVIS Art Studio Visiting Artist Lecture Series
Wednesday, April 7 — 4:30 PM PDT
Through documenting contemporary activists focused on women’s rights, migrant justice, workers’ rights and climate justice, Andrea Bowers is committed to an intersectional feminism that dismantles gender privilege and builds community. Her multivalent art practice documents and honors the activists whose everyday actions forge meaningful change. Bowers is represented by Vielmetter Los Angeles, Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York, Capitain Petzel in Berlin, Kauffman Repetto in Milan, and Jessica Silverman in San Francisco.
To register please follow the link below.
The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery Acquires Works by Steve Roden
Congratulations to Steve Roden whose work has been acquired by The Frances Young Tang Teaching
Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College as part of a gift from Michael O. and Sirje Helder
Gold.
The gift includes works created in the 1990s
and 2000s by a diverse group of leading and
emerging artists, including Louise Bourgeois,
Sean Duffy, Naomi Fisher, Iva Gueorguieva,
Michelle Grabner, Carol Hepper, Steve Roden, Jonathan Seliger, Glen Seator, George Stoll, Beverly Semmes, and Barbara Takenaga.
Mary Kelly — Elson Lecture
The Elson Lecture Series features distinguished contemporary artists who are represented in the National Gallery of Art's permanent collection. On June 15, 2020, Kelly presented an overview of her career and discussed her artistic practice with Shelley Langdale, Curator & Head of Modern Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Stanya Kahn "No Go Backs" Featured in BFI London Film Festival
"Two teenagers traverse a post-apocalyptic California in this tale of an inherited wasteland, unprepared resilience and compassion, which points to the beginnings of a new future."
Paul Mpagi Sepuya 2019 Biennial Grant Recipient from The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation
"The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation revealed the 20 contemporary artists receiving its 2019 Biennial Grants, which come with an unrestricted $20,000 for each recipient. Past recipients of the prize are a veritable who’s-who of influential contemporary artists, and this year’s class is equally impressive."
By Benjamin Sutton - 12 May 2020
Now available: Paul Mpagi Sepuya Monograph
Now available though our new online shop at shop.vielmetter.com is Paul Mpagi Sepuya's monograph recently published by Aperture and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis on the occasion of his first major museum survey exhibition. The monograph includes an interview with the artist by curator Wassan Al-Khudhairi as well as contributions by Malik Gaines, Lucy Gallun, Ariel Goldberg, Evan Moffitt, and Grace Wales Bonner. Check it out by following the Link below.
John Sonsini interviewed on NPR's Morning Edition
"In the current climate, people sometimes see themes of immigration in Sonsini's work. Men leaving home — working hard for money to send back to their families, separation for sustenance. Sonsini denies it. His art, he says, is not political."
By Susan Stamberg – 13 February 2020
Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley Named Visiting Professors at University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design
Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley on their appointment as the Keith L. and Kathy Sachs Visiting Professors in the Department of Fine Arts for the 2019 – 2020 Academic Year at The University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. Mary and Pat will work with graduate students and will give a public lecture at Penn’s Institute of Contemporary Art in Spring 2020.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya interviewed by the Modern Art Notes Podcast
"Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s photographs of himself, his friends and his colleagues advance portraiture through layering, fragmentation, confusion and a certain kind of trompe l’oeil. They make us question what we see, how it’s constructed, and encourage us to contemplate the relationship between reality and artifice."
By Tyler Green – 02 January 2020